White Elephant Dead (Book review)

Carolyn Hart White Elephant Dead (1999) One of a series featuring Annie and Max Darling, she the owner of “Death on Demand”, a bookstore specialising in mysteries; he principal of “Confidential Commissions”, a company specialising in solving problems, which Max occasionally does. As here, when a blackmailer turns up dead in a van collecting donations for the annual White Elephant sale on the island which serves as the setting for this traditional puzzle mystery. Four suspects, a tangled path to the solution, with a final twist.
      A genre-tale stands and falls on the illusion of reality; its universe is after all what Northrop Frye termed romance. The trick is to entice the reader into the fantasy and accept it as life-like, if not like life (a distinction beautifully explained by C S Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism). We want fully rounded main characters, and a cast of secondary characters with enough hints of back stories to give us the same feeling of living in a community that we get from real life: for we do not know all that much about most of the people we know. The physical setting, the weather, the ambiance must also give that impression of there being more than the words convey. The best genre stories do just that, and that’s why huge numbers of people happily enter their worlds, and make their authors very rich.
     This book is middling-average. It’s a workmanlike job, but it lacks that intensity that makes me want to find the other books in the series. The characters have tics rather than traits. Annie’s quirk of recalling mystery characters and plots as she goes about her work of detection becomes mildly irritating after a while. There are arch references to “other pleasures” in her relationship with Max, but little of the dialogue that reveals nuances of love and respect. We know too little of the secondary characters, which the blurb describes as “dotty eccentrics”, but which consist of one quirk each. The ambiance is vague, with generic talk of sunshine and cool shade and such. So what kept me reading? The puzzle, which is well done, well enough that I spent a couple of enjoyable hours with this book. **